Essex charged by Cricket Regulator following historic racist abuse claims

Essex County Cricket Club has been charged by the Cricket Regulator – the sport’s new independent disciplinary body – after a series of historical allegations of racist abuse were last year upheld by an independent report.

In December, a 38-page report compiled by Katherine Newton KC found that, in a period from the mid-1990s to 2013, Essex’s club culture had been one in which ethnic, racial and religious comments were regarded as “banter”.

The report centred on the testimony of three former players – not named in its pages but known to be Jahid Ahmed, Maurice Chambers and Zoheb Sharif, one of whom was nicknamed “Bomber” due to his South Asian heritage, and another taunted with bananas for being Black.

In a separate incident that prompted the commissioning of the report, the former club chair, John Faragher, was alleged to have used the racist phrase “n****r in the woodpile” during a board meeting in 2017, with Essex accepting a fine of £50,000 from the ECB in May 2022 after admitting two charges relating to that meeting.

The club has now been charged with a breach of ECB Directive 3.3 during the years 2001 to 2010, for “conduct, acts or omissions which may be prejudicial to the interests of cricket or which may bring the game of cricket or any cricketer or group of cricketers into disrepute”.

In a statement, the Cricket Regulator said Essex had failed to address the “systemic use of racist and/or discriminatory language and/or conduct at Essex” in that period, adding that an independent panel of the Cricket Discipline Commission would hear the case in due course.

In response, Essex CCC acknowledged the scope of the breach and the club’s willingness to accept the CDC’s findings.

“The club has fully cooperated with the Cricket Regulator and will continue to do so throughout the process, and intends to participate willingly with the Cricket Discipline Commission,” a statement read. “There will be no further comment from the club at this time.

The Cricket Regulator came into being in December 2023, after that summer’s damning report published by Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC), which detailed structural inequalities across race, gender and class in cricket in England and Wales.

In a key recommendation, the ECB’s previous dual roles as promoter and regulator of the game were found to be “irreconcilable”, in light of the board’s handling of Azeem Rafiq’s revelations of institutional racism at Yorkshire.